by Gates, Moses
In fact, the Riverside Park Tunnel isn’t technically a tunnel at all. In the mid-1840s, the Hudson River Railroad constructed a rail line down the west side of Manhattan. It ran at grade next to the Hudson River, and then turned onto city streets when it reached 60th Street. Having a train barrel down the crowded avenues of Hell’s Kitchen wasn’t exactly a bellwether of public safety, so the city came up with a novel solution: they passed an ordinance requiring trains on streets to be preceded by a person on horseback carrying a red flag. These riders quickly gained the nickname “West Side Cowboys.” Unfortunately, this was not a good enough arrangement to keep Eleventh Avenue—where the train ran from 34th to 60th streets—from acquiring a nickname also: “Death Avenue.” Pedestrians, carriage riders, and later automobile passengers were regularly hit and killed by these trains until the 1930s, when a permanent solution was found. The rail line was taken completely off the street, with various sections either put onto elevated tracks or depressed below street level. The section from 123rd Street to 72nd Street next to the Hudson River didn’t actually change grade at all. Instead the rail line was covered over with an extension of Riverside Park. In 1980, this entire West Side freight route was abandoned. The elevated section from 34th to a few blocks down past 14th became today’s High Line, a former urban wilderness and one of my favorite haunts in my early exploring years, which has since been transformed into a public promenade complete with a full espresso bar and several signs with a list of the thirteen things that “park rules prohibit,” which range from drinking, to throwing a Frisbee, to feeding the squirrels. The section under the Riverside Park extension, where we are now, had a less glorious but no less interesting fate. It became the largest underground homeless encampment in New York City.
• • •
In the 1990s, Amtrak acquired the abandoned tunnel and began running passenger trains through to Penn Station. Most of the homeless encampments were dismantled, the people evicted, and today the tunnel is mostly a derelict place frequented by graffiti writers, a handful of remaining residents, and more than a few curious urbanists. It has become one of those places, like the catacombs, that is only just barely out of the realm of official space. This means that it’s exempt from the rules and regulations of polite society but still accessible enough that members of polite society—well, relatively polite society—can visit. And visit they do. This is the most famous, and most traveled, “off-limits” space in New York City.
The role the tunnel has played among graffiti artists over the years is legendary. In the tunnel, the artists have three things lacking in most places topside: light, space, and time. Because of the grates, there’s natural light. Because of the height and length of the tunnel, there’s enough wall space to do huge murals. And because of the relative seclusion and lack of police, there’s enough time to complete these huge murals, which can take days of painting.
The most well-known of these murals are the “Freedom” murals, done by Chris Pape, aka Freedom, from the early 1980s until the mid-1990s. These are mostly in black and silver, about eight or nine feet tall. Many are interpretive portraits: the Mona Lisa, Ted Williams, and the artist himself, sporting a spray paint can for a head, are all represented.
About halfway through the tunnel is a color mural, painted by Freedom and Smith, another writer. It’s a replica of The Third of May 1808, Francisco Goya’s masterpiece showing the execution of Spaniards who rebelled against the rule of Napoleon. The mural is gigantic, about fifteen feet high by thirty feet long. This is over four times the area of the original painting, which itself, at over eleven feet long, dominates the wall it hangs on in the Prado, its home in Madrid. The sheer scale of the Riverside Park Tunnel itself leads to the graffiti and art in it being huge: there’s one piece that’s almost two hundred feet long. But because of this scale, the paintings and tags don’t seem particularly large upon first gaze. It’s only when you’re standing next to them, craning your head up, that you realize just how enormous they are.
These murals have become part of the identity of the tunnel itself, to the point that the tunnel is sometimes referred to as the “Freedom Tunnel,” although Chris Pape later told me that the name is just a fluke. “Smith had painted ‘Freedom Tunnel’ outside the entrance and it just caught on,” he said over a cup of soda with me one day. “It was around the same time subway graffiti was dying and kids needed a different place to paint, so they were like, ‘Hey, let’s go to the Freedom Tunnel.’”
SELF-PORTRAIT BY FREEDOM.
Still, Chris didn’t consider it an unwelcome name. “It’s such a completely unexpected ego boost,” he went on. “It’s bizarre. There’re so many other great graffiti writers who painted in there. I grew up in a very history-minded household, especially New York history, and so to become just a little piece of that huge jigsaw puzzle of history is great.”
In fact, while much of the graffiti has been painted over by other artists, the rare parts of the Freedom murals that have been painted over have been marked by others with phrases such as “Respect Freedom” and “Where’s your respect, Toy?” Like the catacombs, the tunnel and its art have become a destination for a different kind of tourist: ones who are willing to get their fingernails slightly dirty for the chance to see something organic, to interact with it on their own terms, to be part of something—if only in a small, temporary way—that’s uncontrolled.
I first met Brooklyn around my fifth or sixth trip into the tunnel. One Sunday afternoon I was taking a few friends from out of town through it. Immediately upon entry we ran into a gang of high school kids. They called themselves “Urban Odyssey” and had a certain endearing quality to them—a curiosity that reminded me of being young and following intrigue and mystery for adventure. They asked me what urban exploration destinations I’d been to, and things like if the rumors of there being dozens of levels under Grand Central Terminal were true. We headed north through the tunnel for an hour or so, chatting and taking photos, until we came to the emergency exit staircase that, a few years later, Steve would drop an empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s down.
The kids went poking around up on the second level, heading deeper and deeper into the nooks and crannies. After a few minutes they all came running out looking like they’d just seen something out of The Blair Witch Project. Brooklyn was behind them, shouting and shooing them off.
I tried to smooth things over with her, and it wasn’t too tough. After some more shouting she calmed down and introduced herself.
“Listen, there’s some people back here you don’t want to be running into. I’m just trying to help. If you ever come through here again, just ask for me. My name’s Brooklyn.”
Then she said something you really wouldn’t expect a woman living in a train tunnel to say.
“You should know me. I’ve been in mad movies.”
But she wasn’t making that part up. Brooklyn’s been in documentaries shown in the United States, France, Germany, Japan, and probably several other countries. The tunnel and its residents have been quasi-celebrities for almost two decades now. Dark Days, a film by Marc Singer about the people living in the tunnel, won three awards at the Sundance Film Festival in 2000. The Mole People by Jennifer Toth, largely set in the tunnel, was published in 1993 and is still selling briskly today. Despite the tens of thousands of homeless men, women, and children in New York City, all with their own stories, it’s the few living underground who serve as the media’s continuing obsession. In fact, whenever a film crew or journalist from out of town gets in contact with Steve or me to do something on said “Mole People,” which is at least once or twice a year, we shove them through the hole, schlep them down the tunnel, and tell them they should give Brooklyn some money for the interview. We’ve done this for at least a dozen reporters. Brooklyn’s always happy to talk.
My third cousin is an A-list Hollywood actor. For a year my ex-wife, Leigh, worked as a waitress at a popular Man
hattan restaurant where every few days she’d have a story about a new celebrity she’d served—things like how she couldn’t tell if Bill Murray was kidding around with her or not, or that Susan Sarandon still looks incredible in real life. Over the course of my tenure in New York City, I’ve lived in the same neighborhoods as Norman Mailer, Steve Buscemi, and Spike Lee, and seen them—as well as countless other celebrities—just going about their business around town. But my longest conversation with any of these people was saying “Excuse me” to Sarah Jessica Parker when I accidently bumped into her coming out of Leigh’s restaurant. Despite a decade in New York, perhaps the most celebrity-obsessed city on the planet, the most famous people I’ve ever conversed with live in a dirt tunnel under a park.
The boot to the face turns out to be a temporary hiccup in an otherwise lovely night. The good times start again and continue until Erling Kagge, the Norwegian who’s with us, decides it’s time for bed. The expedition was his idea. He had contacted Steve with the idea of an extended journey underneath New York City, which has ended up spiraling into a clusterfuck involving journalists from two major media outlets, a professional videographer, and now a birthday party. Erling is easily the most badass of all of us. He once spent seven weeks by himself walking to the South Pole.
“It was not so bad. I listened to my iPod,” he tells us.
But despite this, he is also the most considerate: other than Steve with his whiskey, he’s the only one who’s brought a birthday present. His daughter Nor has made homemade chocolate for Brooklyn. He bids us good night, and beds down in his sleeping bag wearing a red knit sweater with a fuzzy white heart on it. This is a guy who once killed a polar bear that was attacking him—and then ate it. He is Brooklyn’s favorite. Despite having a boyfriend, she tries to join him in the sleeping bag later on that night. Erling politely reminds her that he’s married.
Erling says: There were many highlights for Steve and me while we hiked for five days, part explorers, part inhabitants, through the underground of New York; among them was Brooklyn’s fiftieth-birthday party. Somehow she appeared to be happier in life than most people we met aboveground during those days. I asked her how that could be, and she replied: “It’s called appreciate what you got. And hold on to it. And don’t lose it. I don’t know why people are miserable—they got everything that I don’t have. And I’m happier than them. . . .” Somehow she understood better than citizens aboveground what makes life good: Moderate your desires, want what you have, and you’ll have what you want. We had a superb party, even by Viking standards.
Perhaps I was too intoxicated and naive that night, or perhaps I was right when, just before I fell asleep, after Brooklyn had “hugged” me good night, I thought to myself that she had a deeper insight of human nature than most people living in civilization. Today I am sober and my reflections on this matter leave me in no doubt that Brooklyn is the thinking human, and her immediate thoughts on happiness are a 180-degree rotation of Plato’s allegory of the cave; for a few minutes during that night the real world was in the cave, and life aboveground the illusion.
• • •
After a fitful night’s sleep, I wake up. I want to wander the tunnel, see what has changed. Something has to be different. Something always is in the tunnel. This is one of the great things about spaces that lie just outside the public realm, places that are remote and unknown enough that you certainly wouldn’t find your average citizen in them, yet that also aren’t so obscure and inaccessible that various subcultures and enterprising individuals can’t find their way there. This combination of being forbidden and yet accessible leads to a hidden but still dynamic area that is not really a part of the everyday city, but is more than just an interesting decaying remnant of history. Somewhere that changes, but solely on its own terms.
I want to explore the tunnel. But I can’t. A little ways down the tunnel there’s a bright light shining. It’s been there since last night. We know what it’s from: a work truck. And we know why the truck is there. It’s there to destroy the murals.
Amtrak has decided that this is the best use of funds they can come up with. They had started at the south end, around 72nd Street, and are currently proceeding to cover the entire tunnel with a dull grey coat of cheap paint, roughly the same color as the tunnel walls. I’ve already done a calculation. At two and a half miles long and twenty feet high, there’s slightly over half a million square feet to paint.
Later I go back to survey the damage. They’ve reached the largest mural, the one depicting the residents’ eviction from the tunnel in the 1990s. Amtrak has done a completely half-assed job, with much of the scene still leaking through the paint. It’s surreal. This mural had been a legend in New York City. It’s like going to Paris, heading to the Louvre, and finding it half empty, with the Mona Lisa gouged out of its frame, leaving behind a few vaguely recognizable bits of canvas still attached to it. What is the point of this? It’s not like graffiti in the outside world, where for every aficionado there are a hundred people who just think it’s ugly scrawling on the wall. If you ask anyone who has actually been in the tunnel—explorers, homeless, even Amtrak workers—if they’d rather have grey paint or an art gallery, every one of them would want the murals to stay. It’s hard to believe my eyes. After all, even the MTA didn’t paint over the Underbelly Project, which would have taken a couple days at most.
But it’s not the destruction that leaves the sour feeling in my stomach. Graffiti has never been a permanent medium. Chris Pape himself never thought the murals would last as long as they did, much less achieve this level of notoriety, or mean something to people he’d never met.
Chris Pape says: When I found out about the murals getting painted over, I had mixed feelings about it. My work had actually been painted over before. There were over forty pieces that I did. Particularly in the first five years, from 1980 to 1985, the Parks Department would go over my work all the time. They didn’t care about me painting, just that someone would see the paintings and think they weren’t doing their jobs. There was a nine-panel mural I did that got painted over in 1982.
It’s funny, I painted all of these not thinking they’d ever get seen. I painted them specifically so people wouldn’t see them. I wanted to be able to fail. Art is about failing. It’s not like I said to myself in 1980: “Hey, for the next 15 years I’ll paint in a tunnel specifically so nobody can see it, so that I’ll end up in a Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art show as one of the pivotal members of the street art movement.” It just doesn’t make sense. But I’m absolutely thrilled anyone cares enough to go down there and take photos. Back then, nobody painted realistically. So anything I painted realistically, people loved. It didn’t matter if the painting had failed in my eyes. And I think some of the paintings are misunderstood . . . but that’s fine.
No, it’s the encroachment—the assertion of control. For as long as I’ve known the place, it’s been off the grid, one of those wonderful spaces that’s exempt from the rules of the outside world. A place where if you want to paint a mural on the wall, you just do it—no hassle, no asking for permission, and no harm to anyone. If you want to live there, you live there—no building codes, no landlords, no electric bills. If you want to have a party, you have a party—no permits needed, no noise complaints, no signs prohibiting throwing a Frisbee or feeding the squirrels. It’s ours. This destruction is the government’s way of telling us that it’s not—that it’s theirs, just part of the thousands and thousands of square miles of official, mapped, controlled space. It’s saying that this place that was created is illegitimate—that it should be just like everywhere else, subject to the same bland rules as the topside world. It’s an insult, a slap in the face. It’s the neighborhood bully finding your secret hideout and ripping down all your posters, or the woods you’ve always walked freely in suddenly sporting “Private Property, No Trespassing” signs.
Gazing at the blank walls down th
e tunnel, I think about how something so beautiful can be destroyed so easily. I think about whether the murals will leave any legacy, whether the fact that I know they’ve been here even mattered now. I think about what any of it meant: all the spaces like this one, all the artists and their creations, all the history I’ve encountered, the adventures I’ve had. I start to think back to the words I found in the other tunnel a few years ago: “None Of This Matters.” And I accept those words. Ultimately all these places I’d been to, these people I’d met, these things I’d seen, weren’t there for any larger purpose. There’s no grand revelation, no greater meaning, no real point. I had discovered what I loved and I had pursued it. Is there any bigger personal indulgence? My last years had been an exercise in selfishness. And none of it mattered.